A History of Zionism (28 page)

The means at the disposal of the Jewish National Fund were still extremely limited – about £50,000 in 1907 – but Ruppin was firmly resolved that a beginning had to be made to extend landholdings, establish new settlements, and consolidate those already existing. He decided to concentrate his efforts in areas not too far from the urban centres in which Jews already constituted a sizable proportion of the population, in Lower Galilee and Judaea.
†
For this purpose the Palestine Land Development Company (
PLDC
) was founded in 1908, to train Jewish workers for settling on land which was to be purchased in cooperation with the Jewish National Fund and J
CA.
The
PLDC
was instrumental in founding the various cooperative and communal settlements, whose early history is reviewed elsewhere in the present study. Between 1908 and 1913, some 50,000 dunam were bought in various parts of the country. On the day war was declared the Palestine Office was on the point of buying 140,000 dunam of the most fertile land in the Jesreel Valley, but the events of August 1914 prevented this and other major acquisitions.
‡

Urban land was acquired on the slopes of Mount Carmel and north of Jaffa, where Tel Aviv was built, and by 1914 this new centre counted fifteen hundred inhabitants. Attempts to enlist private initiative were not particularly successful, but a number of small- and medium-scale enterprises were founded during the last prewar years, including a cement and brick factory, the cultivation and processing of sugar beet, and an engineering workshop. One of the biggest enterprises was launched by
Bezalel
, the arts school, specialising in the manufacture of carpets, wood carvings and similar articles. A Hebrew high school was founded in Jaffa and a teachers’ training college in Jerusalem, in addition to the technical high school and other institutions maintained by the German
Hilfsverein.
The foundations were laid for a network of purely Hebrew schools sponsored by the Zionist Organisation. Jerusalem had two daily newspapers in Hebrew, a National Library, several publishing houses, a sports association, a theatre club. The teachers’ association founded by Ussishkin counted 150 members. In public life Hebrew was used. Ahad Ha’am, professional pessimist though he was, admitted that a miracle had taken place, which he had thought impossible at the time of his first visit almost two decades earlier. For him and other cultural Zionists the emergence of a cultural centre was the most important development of all. Political activities and economic expansion were mere prerequisites, not ends in themselves. To all Zionists the resurrection of the Hebrew language was a major achievement, for a common language was obviously essential to any normal corporate national life.
*

Despite the late start of organised economic and cultural activities in Palestine, the Zionist movement by 1914 had to its credit several important achievements. Jews in Palestine constituted a higher percentage of the total population than in any other country, and more of them were engaged in productive occupations than anywhere else. They had demonstrated that Jews could be farmers, and in the collective settlements they had developed new and highly original forms of communal life. The revival of the Hebrew language was a historical fact. It was no doubt premature to state, as Shmaryahu Levin did, that a new ‘totally Jewish type’ of man had already emerged.
†
But the experience of the second immigration wave had shown that there were enough Jews who wanted to settle in Palestine, despite the hardships and sacrifices entailed, and that, given a period of peaceful development and the goodwill of the Turkish authorities, there was every chance that the new Jewish community would grow in strength and one distant day attain greater political importance. But the whole enterprise was still on a diminutive scale, highly vulnerable, and almost totally dependent on the world Zionist movement and the Jewish communities abroad.

Although their numbers were growing quickly, the Arab population was also increasing, so that the absolute numerical difference was becoming greater. Jewish Palestine was a tender plant; the achievements of the last prewar decade could easily be undone by the deportation of a few thousand people, and this almost happened during the war.

The ‘political Zionists’ were not altogether wrong. It is doubtful whether, but for the war, Zionism would ever have attained any degree of autonomy. But they were wrong inasmuch as they tended to neglect opportunities to strengthen the Jewish position in Palestine. In the event every dunam worked by Jews counted when, after the war, the British mandate came into force. Jewish settlement was not only an important economic factor; it counted heavily in the political balance.

Zionism - East and West

With the spread of the movement the local federations began to play a greater part in Zionist politics. The Russian Federation was the strongest by far, Russia and Poland being the heartland of Zionism, for this was where the Jewish question was most acute. But while Russian Zionism had constituted the main opposition to Herzl and Wolffsohn, it did not play a constructive role commensurate with its numerical strength in the movement. It was labouring under various handicaps: its legal status was disputed, it was under almost constant attack from the authorities, and it lost by emigration to Palestine and other countries many of its most capable members. After 1905, the Russian Zionists became involved, inevitably perhaps, in Russian and Russian-Jewish politics, which absorbed much of their energies. In the Helsingfors programme their leaders voiced the demand for full national equality and the democratisation of Russian political life.

In elections to the Duma they cooperated with other Jewish groups in the effort to attain these aims - without any conspicuous success. There were thirteen Jewish representatives in the first Duma, six in the second, and two in the third. The authorities did not find it difficult to manipulate the results of the elections, as the Jews had to compete against both Russian voters and those of other nationalities. The electoral struggle in Poland brought them into conflict with the Polish national movement. When faced with the choice between a Polish nationalist with antisemitic leanings and a Polish Social Democrat, they opted for the latter. This in turn caused great resentment in Polish national circles and Jewish shops were boycotted. The revolutionary disturbances of 1905-6 were followed by years of repression, which strongly affected Zionist activities.

In Germany Zionism faced no such obstacles. Founded in Cologne in May 1897 shortly before the first congress, it was headed at first by Wolffsohn and Bodenheimer. Since they had no press of their own, German Zionists found it difficult to make their existence known to the wider public. The situation changed only with the acquisition of the
Jüdische Rundschau
in 1902. The number of shekel payers rose from 1,300 in 1901 to over 8,000 in 1914. (It was third in size after the United States and Russia, whose Jewish communities were much larger than the German.)
*
The members were dedicated men and women, some of them
Ostjuden
, recent arrivals from eastern Europe, others from assimilated families who felt acutely the anomaly of Jewish existence even in the relatively mild antisemitic climate of Wilhelmian Germany.

Among its leaders, apart from those already mentioned, there was Kurt Blumenfeld, a highly cultured man and a persuasive speaker, who was instrumental in gaining the support of eminent people outside the orbit of Zionism, such as Albert Einstein.
†
Blumenfeld was secretary of the German Federation from 1909 to 1911, later secretary of the world organisation, and from 1924 president of the German branch. Zionist attempts to establish positions of strength in the Jewish communal organisations were not at first successful. In the internal disputes shaking world Zionism the Germans at first tended to support Wolffsohn and the political trend, but the younger generation was gradually won over to practical Zionism by Weizmann and the Russian leaders, and after the ninth (Hamburg) congress their influence became predominant in the German Federation.

How to explain the fact that only a comparatively small minority of Jews joined the movement in Germany and that the majority was actively opposed? It has been said that German Jews, smitten by blindness and unaware of the precariousness of their situation, pursued an ostrich-like policy. Such
post hoc
rationalisations are of little help in understanding their situation at the time, which was anything but desperate. Even if some careers were barred to Jews, the majority were reasonably content and felt themselves at home in Germany. There was less antisemitism there than in France or Austria, not to mention eastern Europe. Despite certain unlovely features in its political system, Germany was a
Rechtsstaat.
It was unthinkable that any citizen could be arrested without due process of law. The state was sufficiently liberal to tolerate even a minority which proclaimed its allegiance to another state as yet to be established. When Kurt Blumenfeld propagated a radical programme, calling all Zionists to prepare themselves for emigration to Palestine, he was accused of trying to uproot German Jews artificially. His argument that they were in fact uprooted was by no means generally accepted even within Zionist circles.
*
It needed a world war and the general dislocation in its wake, and eventually the rise of Nazism, to attract wider sections to the Zionist idea.

Herzl had always attached particular importance to Britain and was much encouraged by the moral support he found among Anglo-Jewry. He first gave public expression to his ideas about the Jewish state at a meeting of the Maccabeans, a small association of Jewish professional people in London, in September 1895. The great assembly in White-chapel in July 1896 was his first encounter with the Jewish masses. These early expectations later gave way to disappointment. Neither the Rothschilds nor the Anglo-Jewish establishment were willing to embrace the new faith. But Herzl’s followers did not give up and with the outbreak of war British Zionism became a factor of decisive importance. The Lovers of Zion had been active in Britain even before Herzl. Among the oldest and most respected families, such as the Montefiores, the Montagues, and the D’Avigdors, there was a great deal of traditional, albeit platonic sympathy for the resettlement of Jews in Palestine. Herbert Bentwich and Israel Zangwill were among the organisers of the ‘Maccabean Pilgrimage’ to Palestine in 1897. In the following year the Clerkenwell conference, with Colonel Albert Edward Goldsmid as its chairman, laid the foundation for the establishment of a British Zionist Federation.
†
Most of the supporters of the movement were recent arrivals from eastern Europe, but there were also some from oldestablished families. Sir Francis Montefiore gave his name and some of his time to the movement. And Joseph Cowen (also English-born) and Leopold Greenberg were warm supporters of Herzl and, after his death, of political Zionism.

The majority of the community were, however, as in Germany, indifferent or even actively hostile. The secession of Zangwill and the ‘territorialists’ after the Uganda congress weakened the movement. Territorialism had the support of Lord Rothschild, the lay leader of Anglo-Jewry, and Lucien Wolf, its most influential ideologist, not, needless to say, because they contemplated transferring their own activities to Uganda, but because they thought the scheme likely to take the wind out of the Zionist sails. The movement suffered from the conflict between Herzlian and practical Zionists, and there was also much personal antagonism among the leaders. The crisis came to a head in 1909-10, when no one could be found to act as chairman of the federation.

For a while its very existence was in the balance. Eventually Joseph Cowen was prevailed upon to accept the thankless task. He was succeeded by Leopold Kessler, who had led the El Arish expedition. After 1912, with the appearance on the scene of a new generation of young Zionists, such as Leon Simon, Norman Bentwich, Harry Sacher, Israel Sieff and Simon Marks, there was a new expansion of activities. Together with Weizmann, who had settled in Manchester in 1904, they constituted the backbone of a revived movement. This was the ‘Manchester school of Zionism’, defined by one of its members as a fellowship of friends, brought together by a common cause and sharing a common approach under an unofficial leadership: ‘The old controversy between “politicals” and “practicals” had ebbed away as far as the younger generation was concerned for lack of combatants and a battleground … they were Zionists first and sectarians (if at all) a long way after.’
*
By 1914 the Zionist Federation of Great Britain had some fifty branches and during the war it gained many new adherents. A resolution in 1915 in favour of the establishment of a publicly recognised, legally secured home for the Jewish people in Palestine was signed by 77,000 members of the community.

Herzl’s summons to the first Zionist congress aroused little enthusiasm in America but a great deal of criticism, beginning with warnings that the weather in Palestine was inclement and ending with a reaffirmation of Israel’s mission among the
goyim
to promote peace, justice and love.
†
A few outsiders joined political Zionism, including a group of recent Russian immigrants in Chicago, who later became known as the Knights of Zion, and two rabbis of German-Jewish origin in their seventies – Gustav Gottheil and Bernhard Felsenthal, who welcomed Herzl’s call. American Zionism in the early days was anything but a strong force though on paper its federation, founded in New York in July 1898, looked impressive enough. It consisted of about a hundred societies with a membership of five thousand in New York alone. But this was a loose organisation consisting mainly of members of Hebrewspeaking clubs, Jewish educational societies, synagogue organisations, and fraternal lodges which had joined the federation corporatively.
*
Only in 1917 did the Zionist Organisation of America (ZOA) come into being; it substituted individual for group membership. American Zionists met at their yearly conventions, assured each other of their devotion to the cause, passed resolutions, sent delegations to the Zionist congresses, and a few bought land in Palestine. But despite the events in eastern Europe and the wave of pogroms which seemed to bear out Zionist analyses and predictions only too accurately, the impact of the movement was hardly felt in American life. Europe, after all, was far away and the situation of American Jewry and its prospects gave no cause for concern.